I would like to highlight and submit the paradox at the heart of the gig economy. At one end, the gig economy relies on a critical mass of consumers willing to pay for additional value on top in the form of convenience and real-time demand networks, but at the same time the economic model also leads to a race to the bottom as it assumes and necessitates that every request is served with the least amount of friction possible (capital, labor or otherwise). Which creates a problem, if the future of work is an expansion of the economic trends behind the gig economy (cost reductions by passing the buck onto the employees and highly dynamic workforces), then that logically means the number of people who have the capability to afford it in the first place also decreases as the buying power of the populace decreases.
We are trapped in a strange loop. The excess buying power of consumers that has arisen from capitalism has also led the same system to incentivize services and practices that are reducing the buying power of consumers.
Our old way of looking at things in isolated subsets will bring us to ruin. We really should adopt a new perspective and a new way of doing things where we view our economies as ecosystems or networks might clarify why these changes are occurring (the gig economy is far from the only change that's happening). For example, we can look at excessive economic inequality and understand why it is bad by looking at natural ecosystems and how they are a closed loop.
For e.g. Consumers are like plankton. They are the injection of biomass (money) into the system that ensures money changes hands when they buy goods and services. A single entity, no matter how rich, cannot provide equivalent mass to the greater ecosystem than a large set of consumers. Or, in other words, a billionaire requires only so many pairs of sunglasses and Netflix subscriptions. Ergo, a broad base of wealth where people can afford the products around them is essential for a capitalistic ecosystem to function, as these plankton keep feeding entities higher up in the food chain through an accumulation effect.
For whatever reason, just like we have decimated our natural environment, we have also decimated our economic ecosystem. The number of entities with high purchasing power is rapidly decreasing, and this signals a significant problem for the future of the ecosystem. And it also suggests how automation can end up eating itself economically unless we institute measures - artificial or otherwise - that inject capital back into the building blocks of the economy.
I suspect that as computing gets better, we will eventually create models that will make the invisible transparent and make our debates about these topics quaint to people of this future. Maybe what we need more than just lobbying instacart is systems that allow us to see economies in real-time and simulate outcomes of individual, highly variable, irrational agents at unprecedented scales in order to give policymakers definitive answers about issues like this, for we are governing blind and I am afraid of what the future holds for us.